I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage

Author

Prologue

TO call it lovemaking eons before anyone develops the idea of love, let alone links it to sex, would be absurd. In primal time there are no romantic delusions, no secret trysts, no promises, no privacy, no future plans. There’s only lust, followed by sex—mindless sex, even for the creatures with minds.

So humans aren’t making love, not yet, but they’ve already assumed the position without which lovemaking will be virtually unthinkable: belly to belly, length to length, face to face, eye to eye. And in this human proclivity for frontal sex—for making the beast with two backs, to use the crude Elizabethan phrase— lies the potential for romance, emotional entanglement, erotic passion, and love love love, marital and extramarital.

In the future, who has sex with whom, and when, and where, and in what position will become a very complicated business indeed. What matters in primal time is survival, which depends on rapid reproduction, which depends on copulation unfettered by conscious thought. History will demonstrate ad nauseam that once sex becomes mindful and thereby meaningful—once people figure out, for example, the cause-and-effect relationship between copulation and conception—making the beast with two backs will be subject to impediments. This can’t happen too soon, or we wouldn’t be here. Evolutionary logic suggests that the endgame of sex escapes awareness until humankind nails survival. There will be plenty of time for impediments later on.

How much later? That question can be answered only speculatively, and loosely, by considering the archaeological timeline. The ability to make tools—a sign of rudimentary intelligence at work—dates back about 2.5 million years. But there’s a vast cognitive distance between putting together a spear and putting together something as abstract as, say, a mythological explanation of life’s origins, and it takes practically forever to close. Given that distance, and the fact that while maternity is obvious, paternity is not, people probably don’t connect sex to reproduction for many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years.¹. Until this vital association is made—until men realize that women do not conceive new life all by themselves—there’s little reason, in the Darwinian sense, to put the brakes on sexual activity, men’s or women’s. Notions of morality, propriety, guilt, and sin haven’t been formed. Nor has the double standard of fidelity, that future anchor of marital law. And marriage itself—the civilizing agent of sex—hasn’t been institutionalized. These developments await a series of external events that begin to converge in prehistory, some time after 12,000 BCE.²

By then, modern humans have fully evolved and subdivided into three races. Traveling in groups, or tribes, they’re on the move, fanning out from Africa around the globe. Some tribes have already settled around the great river valleys of the Near East, and others inhabit caves farther north in what is now Europe, but most remain nomadic; they follow the food supply wherever it leads.³

Tribal members, men and women, pool their skills and their cunning to fend off the recurrent perils of common life. Their united struggle against starvation is waged on two fronts, animal and vegetable—both essential food sources—by two different teams. Innate logic dictates that the labor be split along gender lines. Men’s greater strength, higher muscle-to-fat ratio, and unencumbered biology obviously suit them to the rigors of hunting; the breeding cycle limits women’s mobility (and when it bears fruit, compounds their tasks), making the job of gathering plants and grains best suited to them.

Crossover is possible. There may be the occasional woman who is rugged enough to haul a spear over treacherous terrain and who’s also blessed with the acute vision to spot fast-moving prey, along with the sharp reflexes and sheer raw nerve to kill it—or be killed. There may well be the occasional man who does better in the field than on the trail. Still, it seems safe to say that female hunters and male gatherers are about as representative of the tribal population as female breadwinners and male homemakers are of the average middle-class marriage today: not very.

But while men and women labor daily at different tasks in different places, as they will in the future, it’s likely that women’s work has yet to be downgraded in comparison to men’s; women themselves have yet to be downgraded in comparison to men. In the common struggle for survival they are mutually indispensable— each sex contributes something essential that the other isn’t equipped to procure or produce on its own—and therefore of relatively equal stature.

Everything is shared: food and water, fire and shelter, the care of children, and the grown-ups’ reproductive equipment. Men and women participate in a fluid, inclusive sexual system that anthropologists generally call group marriage. Its existence can only be assumed (this is prehistory, after all), but the musical- chair-like mating game the term describes is certainly feasible and even probable—simply because such an arrangement would favor survival.⁴ Biology alone inhibits mating, although only for women who are already pregnant; as long as there are other ovulating women available, men’s work is never done.

Group marriage is plausible while sexual behavior remains uncivilized and instinctive, outside of conscious control. But once the mystery of conception is solved and the idea of ownership is born, it becomes untenable. Organized communal sex will never work again—and not for lack of trying. Both the Marxist-inspired free love movement of the mid-i8oos and the open marriage idea spawned by the so-called sexual revolution of the early 1970 s, to name two recent incarnations, will be embraced by the outré few and quickly consigned to the dustbin of history’s radical social experiments without ever attracting more than voyeuristic interest among the majority.⁵

As it happens, the death knell for group marriage (and mindless sex) has already begun to ring. The gender parity that has presumably been the pattern for eons will be reconfigured in relative seconds—a casualty of the civilizing process.⁶ What catalyzes that process? It’s undocumented by human hand, but there are enough environmental clues to suggest a plausible scenario. Those clues lie in a sequence of interrelated events, precipitated by something that could not sound more mundane: a change in the weather.⁷

Let’s say that sometime between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE, in the vicinity of the Mediterranean Sea, a wandering tribe hacks its way through dense underbrush. Upon emerging, these nomads stop dead in amazement. They stand at the edge of a field fertile beyond imagining, a vast edible tableau of golden grains and wheat begging to be harvested, and promising to yield more than enough food to feed everyone for a year. The air is warm, the soil is rich, the sun glitters. Why not stay for the night—and the next, and the next? The gatherers get busy gathering; the hunters, having investigated the verdant forests surrounding the open land and found them full of well-nourished animal life, get busy hunting (and saving time, too, without fruitless hours and days spent tracking elusive prey). Pretty soon the group concurs that chasing the food supply when it’s right in front of you, replenishing itself as fast as it’s consumed, no longer makes sense. The wandering days are over. The group settles down.

Global warming, of a sort, has made this new phase of human existence possible. The fourth, the longest and (so far) the last, Ice Age has ended. The frozen sheets, hundreds of feet thick, which had turned most of the northern hemisphere into a gigantic skating rink for the past hundred thousand years, have finally returned to their Arctic origins. The newly temperate worldwide climate brings hot, dry summers and cool, moist winters to the Near East, and umpteen generations of European cave dwellers migrating south in search of hospitable temperatures find their way there.

The change in the weather changes everything. It makes settled life possible and sparks the development of farming, which leads directly to an electrifying epiphany—an intellectual eureka moment of incalculable significance. Now that men have become sheperds rather than hunters, they’re able to observe animal behavior at close range, day after day. One day the lightbulb goes on.

Here’s the scenario: A shepherd watches a ram trot over to a receptive ewe and mount her. When the act is completed, the ram doesn’t lie down and go to sleep (as the man, given his druthers, might at such a moment). Instead, he mounts a new partner—sometimes a dozen more before the day’s over. Several weeks later, the shepherd notices that the bellies of these same ewes appear to be swelling. The shepherd knows the likely result of this peculiarly female shape-shifting process, but until now has never guessed the cause. In lieu of evidence to the contrary, he assumed that baby making was self-generated by females and wholly unrelated to the sexual act. Suddenly, he gets it.

The shepherd has stumbled upon what will soon be the glaringly obvious truth about male sexuality, human and animal alike: Ejaculation, gratifying though it may be, is not the end of copulation but the midpoint, the indispensable—and heretofore missing— link between copulation and conception. He already knows that his sexual anatomy, which enables him to penetrate a woman’s body, is a source of physical pleasure and release. Now he begins to grasp that it is also a source (the source, he will soon decide) of life itself. The bellies of women do not swell of their own accord; men must first sow their seeds within. He grasps that his own life- giving power, awe-inspiring in itself, is also—more awe-inspiring still—potentially without limit. While a female is capable of being impregnated only when she’s ovulating, and only by one male at a time, allowing the human female to give birth about once a year, a healthy man has the ability to impregnate numerous women—at any time, on any day, of any month, between puberty and death.

In this matter of procreation, men have spent eons upon eons underestimating themselves, and eons upon eons overestimating women. They won’t let either happen again anytime soon. On the contrary, now that lightning’s struck, they will steadily magnify their reproductive role—until, with a major assist from Aristotle, fatherhood comes to mean nearly everything and motherhood almost nothing. It helps, of course, to be able to document this self-directed progression to stardom. Thanks to the invention of writing, that documentation will be ample indeed.

Exhibit A: The word seed is mentioned no less than 222 times in the Old Testament, where it is deemed so precious that to spill it anywhere but inside a reproductively capable woman’s reproductive orifice (and none other) is to incite the murderous wrath of God.⁸ Exhibit B: In classical Athens, the citizens (all of them, by definition, male) are so enamored of their l ife-engendering equipment that sculptures of massive erections dominate the cityscape as ubiquitously as crosses later will in Christian Rome.⁹ Exhibits C to F: the words incubator, container, receptacle, vessel. To describe the entirety of the maternal role as it will shortly be perceived, pick any one.

Men have always surpassed women in physical strength. The newfound knowledge of paternity helps to anchor in consciousness the idea, or the hope, that men surpass women on the more profound level of being —of intrinsic human worth. Over time the notion becomes axiomatic for both men and women and a matter of public policy, whatever the private truth may be. From it, the principle of patriapotestas, literally the rule of the father, follows logically.

How curious, then, that men should seem so threatened—so oppressed, especially in marriage—by women, affirming and reaffirming their physical, intellectual, and moral superiority, yet claiming repeatedly to be outmaneuvered and undone by what all presume to be the weaker sex. The intertwined story of women and marriage is largely filtered through a testosterone prism. Because of that, it reveals very little about women’s experience, but plenty about what men think or imagine women’s experience to be. Which is to say it reveals men’s experience of women. Which is to say it reveals men. And men, throughout this story, often seem stymied by women, no matter what measures they take to protect themselves. Western history and literature teem with treacherous females who have their way with men. They have it by stealth, by seduction, by coercion, by dissembling, by their wits; in any case they have it regularly.

More exhibits: Eve hands Adam temptation without disguising it, and he bites. In her wake are Delilah and Jezebel, who somehow force a great warrior and an enthroned king, respectively, to betray or dishonor everything that matters to their society. Elsewhere, in the Mediterranean, Homer constructs an epic poem around the presumption that one woman’s beauty will prove toxic enough to start a war and ultimately level an entire society. Recurrent suspicion that women can render men flaccid or tumescent at will, through witchcraft, helps to fuel four hundred years of mass hysteria from Spain to Germany to the American colonies, leading to the ostracization, torture, and execution of alleged evildoers, 80 to 85 percent of whom happen to be female.¹⁰

What compels the designated stronger sex, whose members produce and preserve the work that defines Western culture, to view itself repeatedly as an easy mark for members of the designated weaker sex? If one side is really convinced of its superiority to the other, why the need to issue ceaseless reminders on that score? How can men have at their disposal an arsenal of weapons, including law and custom weighted heavily in their favor, to be used against women—who have, in any tangible sense, zilch—and yet project themselves as defenseless victims of women?

As men’s tangled history of their lives with women unfolds through fact and fiction there’s a refrain that emerges, a subtextual complaint that the composers may not even recognize, and it reverberates between the lines century after century. In the domestic and sexual union that is unique to married life, there seems to be an inherent contradiction between authority and power. The difference is far from obvious. A husband’s authority over his wife is endorsed, accepted, indeed commanded—by God, by law, by social consensus, every which way—from the beginning, without question. It should go without saying that he who has the authority automatically has the power as well, but in marriage this turns out to be not quite true.

In marriage, men cannot help revealing themselves, exposing themselves—physically, emotionally, spiritually, sexually, one way or another—to their wives. This is also true in reverse, of course, but the stakes are so much lower that a wife’s exposure can do no worse than to confirm the assumption at the heart of patriarchal marriage: Women are inferior to men as servants are to masters, and no one expects much from inferiors. But masters have a hell of a lot to lose and a hell of a distance to fall. Either way, they’re vulnerable.

And here the rule of the father comes back to haunt the fathers themselves. That’s the source of the power that men unwittingly bestow upon their wives. Whether the women wield it or not is up to them—and if literature mirrors life, sources ranging from the Bible and Roman mythology to Renaissance tragedy, Restoration comedy, and straight through to the modern age teem with women who do. Men, states one of them in 1993, exist in a state of perpetual enmity towards women.¹¹

But these hellishly complicated feelings men hold toward women across the ages track back to the paternal awakening, to the moment when the rapture fades and the anxiety creeps in. The heightened sense of potency has a flip side: heightened vulnerability. Against it men try to armor themselves. Instituting the rule of the father provides a semi-safe harbor along the shoals of daily life. It means that wives enjoy the same legal status as children and slaves, which is to say none. They’re deprived of civic voice, property rights, and all the rest. But the buffer systems men devise are no more than that. Awareness of paternity afflicts them with apparently permanent insecurity. They often seem stumped by their need for women, starting with the undeniable reality that women possess the only suitable containers in which seed can thrive. And that’s the heart of the dilemma: How can a man be sure that it is his seed alone she breeds, not his brother’s or cousin’s or neighbor’s? The answer, until the advent of DNA technology in the 1980s: He can’t.

It’s he who has no wife who is no cuckold, Chaucer writes in the latter half of the fourteenth century,¹² crisply distilling one of the most persistent themes in Western culture since the start of history. The belief spans ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and even Victorian eras: women are sexually rapacious, indeed insatiable. A catch-22 arises out of the prehistoric paternal euphoria, eventually becoming a historical constant: Women must be controlled, but women can’t be controlled.

When civilization finally stirs in its Near Eastern cradle, men have just begun to feel uneasy. How can they safeguard the precious paternity they’ve just discovered? They’ve awoken to a problem that they identify as Woman, and now they set about solving it. At the outset there’s no reason to think that success might elude them. After all, if goats and dogs and cows can be domesticated and possessed, why not women?

So the civilizers make the control of sex their first priority. It’s the right move at the right time: To control sex is to control reproduction, and to control reproduction is (theoretically) to control women, by controlling their access to sexual partners—and to control women is to ease or even eliminate entirely the threat to men. They devise numerous strategies to achieve this goal, and though their successors adjust the mix, tailoring the details to fit the times, at all times men reach for the same end, and fall short.

Of those strategies, three eclipse all others: patriarchal marriage (the rule of the father); the double standard of sexual fidelity (loose for husbands, rigid for wives); and confinement at home (woman’s place). Men put these tactics in play at the start and keep them in play throughout history.

We’ll see how well they work.

ONE

Paradise Lost, Just Because He

Listened to His Wife

HERE’sthe heart of the matter, the belly of the beast, the big slam dunk: the first, and until modern times the only, template for marriage in the West. With the consistent backing of Church, state, and society, this becomes the one-size-fits-all standard of behavior to which husbands and wives must conform (or else), dictates their respective roles, and defines their mutual obligations. It governs the development of Jewish and Christian doctrine as well as secular law. Its impact on marriage and family life has been, to put it mildly, significant. It’s the idea that will not die. And it’s a marvel of concision, to boot.

One line. Six words. Eight syllables. The book of Genesis, chapter 3, verse 16: Your husband. . . shall rule over you¹ So God commands Eve when he returns to the garden after his seventh-day rest to find her and Adam skulking around, covered in fig leaves and shame. As long as religion holds sway over the West, so will the belief that the Bible is a literal transcription of God’s words, and so will the belief that God’s commands are final, subject to neither challenge, revision, nor dismissal by humans. So too, then, the belief that when God commands Eve to be ruled by her husband, he commands all wives to be ruled by their husbands—and, by implication, commands all husbands to rule their wives, which will not go unnoticed. And there things stand for umpteen centuries.

The idea of husbands ruling their wives would not be news to most people living in the biblical era. Work on the book of Genesis—a collaboration between several writers/editors plucking themes and variations from a vast oral network of source narratives—is thought to span most of the final millennium BCE(c. 1200-1000 to c. 200 BCE). For contemporary Israelites as well as their pagan neighbors, Genesis 3:16 restates the obvious. Hierarchy is common protocol. Subjects must obey their kings, servants their masters, children their fathers, wives their husbands. Nothing else makes sense, for now. People don’t possess the leisure, the life span, the social permission, and God knows what else to mess around with horizontal power-sharing arrangements, or even to imagine them. This world order is vertical; it’s all about chains of command, and the rough justice that awaits those who break the chain. Break it they do, of course, men and women both—and if they’re discreet, they might just get away with it. Otherwise, they’ll be pilloried by their communities.

The distance between what is supposed to be and what is can be immense, as these men and women already know from experience. Some husbands don’t, won’t, or can’t rule their wives; some wives don’t, won’t, or can’t obey their husbands, no matter what. And that’s the beauty of Genesis 3:16. Cast as a direct order from God himself and delivered with the infinite force of his certitude, the writers transform secular consensus into divine imperative. God-fearing men and women take divine imperatives very seriously indeed—more seriously, perhaps, than secular ones. Considering that God-fearing men and women will be the rule and not the exception until, let’s say, the nineteenth century, this is an excellent move. In addition to social pressure, spouses have another reason—a sacred duty—to play their prescribed roles, something that the religious establishment will pointedly remind them at every opportunity. And if further inducement is needed, there’s the biblical God himself. His attitude toward humans who fail to take him or his orders seriously will soon become apparent.

This God is unlike all other gods worshipped in the ancient world, and not just because they are plural. He doesn’t belong to or even lead a pantheon of immortals, nor does he incarnate some element of nature (heaven, earth, sun, sea) or of human experience (love, war, wine, fertility).He is the pantheon; he incarnates nothing, yet is everything; he is indivisible. He is also, most uniquely, invisible. Awestruck biblical characters testify to their personal encounters with God, who seems to be everywhere at once—atop a mountain, emanating from a shrub, gliding through a garden in the cool of the day. They tremble and swoon when he approaches; they swear that his presence is palpable, terrifyingly so. Yet they cannot see him. In the Israelite conception, God does not, in any material sense, exist. Any suggestion to the contrary, any attempt to anthropomorphize God, to carve or paint or engrave his image as other cultures depict their idols, is anathema. (The mere idea that he would assume human form to wander barefoot through the Galilee as a Jewish rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth, preaching to crowds and sharing meals with disciples—much less bleeding while nailed upright to a cross—will be reason enough for the Jews to reject Christianity out of hand.)

If God is sui generis, so must be his creative process. Accordingly, the primal saga that plays out in the first three chapters of the Bible distinguishes itself from the start. Typically, these ancient myths ascribe the birth of heaven and earth and so forth to the divine performance of a familiar human activity. Both the Babylonian and Assyrian myths, for instance, begin with an act of copulation between god and goddess (solid evidence, surely long after the fact, that men’s reproductive role is no mystery). The Egyptian rendering makes it hard not to infer that men there must really be on a roll: The great sun god Atun stands on a precipice, masturbating, and at the climactic moment he aims his semen into the watery depths far below.² Who needs to make the beast with two backs when all you need is your hand? But the God of Genesis works in no way that humans can discern or comprehend; the writers don’t even try to do either. Biblical creation, like the creator himself, is inscrutable and abstract, a manifestation of divine intellect. Let’s just say that God thinks, and therefore we are.

Although we’re not anywhere, yet. Genesis takes its sweettime, twenty-six verses in all, getting to the human arrival.In the beginning,as the Bible famously begins, all is nothing, vast and unformed and empty, with darkness shrouding the water (as in other ancient traditions, water is present before heaven or earth or anything else, signaling its primary importance to life), sometimes rendered in English as the deep. But there is also,in verse 2, a wind from God sweeping over the water, for God is already rolling up his metaphorical sleeves. In verse 3 he pounces. Let there be light, he says, and light there is. He calls it Day, separating it from the darkness he now labels Night; he summons dry land,and dry land appears, which he calls Earth; he tells it to produce plants and herbs and fruit-bearing trees, each containing its seed after its kind, and Earth complies. He summons the sun, the greater light to dominate the day, and the moon, the lesser light to dominate the night, and the two lights perform as instructed. Having spent the first four days, as the Bible reckons, arranging the inanimate universe to his liking (step by step he revels in his work, sees that it is good), God begins to populate it. He conjures living creatures out of nowhere, it seems, other than his mind, and sets them aloft in the sky or swimming in the sea or crawling across the earth, exuberantly and flawlessly orchestrating their movements. Whatever God says—or thinks, or wills—into existence, there it is, just like that; and whatever he commands is done. With this track record established in chapter 1, the biblical audience has every reason to assume that when God tells Eve, Your husband . . . shall rule over you, in chapter 3,this too will be done.

With each life-form, God makes a point of differentiating male from female, equipping them all with whatever they need to comply with his directive to be fertile and increase (also rendered, in the more poetic but also more antiquated parsing, be fruitful,and multiply).God himself, you may recall, has no body and is therefore neither male nor